Category: Harness Cheryl

The Aristocrat and the Spy

5/17/2022

Cheryl Harness
She’s historical!

Since 1775, Americans in the 13 British Colonies had been fighting to free themselves from mighty Great Britain. The French didn’t care for the British, having had their own wars with them, so many a Frenchman came to help the Americans. One was a teenaged aristocrat, the Marquis de Lafayette. He so admired America’s revolutionary ideals of liberty and democracy that he sailed there in 1777 to offer his money and services to his idol, General George Washington. By 1781, General Lafayette was leading French and American troops, battling the British in Virginia. Now a fellow there named James Armistead joined the fight, once he got his master’s permission. After all, Armistead was an enslaved African American.

               What did he do? He hung around the British, finding out what they were up to – dangerous work! Then Armistead, patriot spy, took his info to General Lafayette, who used it to help beat the British at Yorktown in October 1781, which, in turn, led to the United States’ victory in the Revolutionary War.

               The Marquis went back to France. Armistead went back to work for his master. Though he’d helped win America’s independence, he did not win his. When Lafayette made a return visit in 1784, he was outraged to find his fellow veteran still enslaved! The Marquis saw to it that Armistead was freed and the former slave showed his gratitude by changing his name to James Armistead Lafayette.

               But this isn’t how the story ends. Forty years later, the Americans invited the Marquis to come for a visit. He’d grown old. He’d suffered in prison during France’s own revolution in the 1790s. How splendid it was, visiting the United States— all 24 of them! Oh, the parties and banquets the Americans had for their old friend! But one of the happiest moments of all was in early 1825. The old aristocrat was riding in a parade through Richmond, Virginia, when he spotted a white-haired black gentleman in the crowd. The Marquis reined in his horse, dismounted, and went to greet James Armistead Lafayette. And the two old heroes of the American Revolution flung their arms around one another.

James Armistead Lafayette

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette

The Marquis de Lafayette in his later years.

Cheryl Harness uses her wonderfully vibrant art and down-to-earth writing style to present George the adventurous boy, tromping through the woods with his dog and his hunting rifle; George the courageous military leader fighting alongside his men; George the cunning military strategist, outfoxing the British and forcing their surrender at Yorktown; George the brilliant statesman presiding over the Constitutional Convention; and George the President, wisely protecting our country from enemies foreign and domestic so it could grow strong. For more information, click here.

MLA 8 Citation
Harness, Cheryl. "The Aristocrat and the Spy." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think
Tank, 10 Apr. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/
the-aristocrat-and-the-spy.

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May Day

4/29/2022

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Cheryl Harness

She’s historical!

For some of us, spring begins when you can go outside in your shorts and not get cold legs. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, spring’s official start is at the vernal equinox, when the sun shines directly on the earth’s equator. For me, here in Missouri, that was March 20, 5:45 P.M. CDT. The autumnal equinox arrives in September— when spring begins in the southern hemisphere! But I digress from today’s theme: May Day. For thousands of years, it’s been a day for celebrating spring, But that’s not all it’s been.

     Since the oldest olden days, winter-weary people have gloried when the weather warms and the cold earth comes back to life. Some of their ancient festivals still happen every spring, such as Sham el Nissim, in Egypt. In India, on Holi, dancing Hindus still shower one another with colors; and Iranians still fix a special supper at Norooz, as did their ancient Persian ancestors.

     When the Roman armies invaded ancient Britain, in 55 B.C.E. they brought along their spring holy day, Floralia, when they gathered bouquets of flowers for their goddess, Flora. The Celts, who’d been living in Britain for years, celebrated the earth mother’s reawakening with dances and bonfires at Beltane, around the end of April. Over the years, the holidays blended into May Day, a time for giving gifts of flowers and dancing about a Maypole, strung with ribbons.

Then, in the 1880s, May Day celebrations changed. It was like this: For decades, factory owners had been making their employees work anywhere from 10 to 16 hours a day, six days a week (even children!), often in unsafe, nasty conditions. The workers were sick of it! They organized themselves into labor unions. At a Chicago gathering, in 1884, they started a worldwide movement for an 8-hour workday. With a huge demonstration in the city, on May 1, 1886, May Day came to be the first Labor Day, a day of parades. It’s still celebrated as International Workers’ Day in many countries.

But one more thing happened, in 1923. Because ‘May Day’ sounds like the French phrase, ‘m’aidez’ or ‘help me,’ a London radioman turned it into an international distress call. So if you hear “Mayday! Mayday!” on your radio, no one’s wishing you ‘Happy Spring!’ Someone’s in trouble! And once he or she is saved, I’ll bet he or she would like to have some pretty flowers.

May Day festivities at National Park Seminary in Maryland, 1907. Celebrations were common at women's colleges and academic institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Wikimedia Commons

A maypole at a Renaissance Fair in Tuxedo Park, New York. Wikimedia

International Workers' Day began a celebration of laborers and the working classes but later the date was adopted by anarchists, socialists, and communists and other groups. It occurs every year on May Day. "Socialists in Union Square, N.Y.C." May 1, 1912. The Library of Congress

Cheryl Harness is the author and illustrator of Remember the Ladies: 100 Great American Women. One of the 100 Ladies is the great and heroic labor union activist "Mother" Mary Harris Jones. She was born on May Day, 1830. Click here to find out more about about Mary, and about a lot of other great Americans.

MLA 8 CItation
Harness, Cheryl. "May Day." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 1 May 2018,
www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/May-Day.

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Shocking Fanny Wright

3/31/2022

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Cheryl Harness
She’s historical!

An 1835 Sketch of "Miss Wright"

When she was a girl in Scotland, Frances or “Fanny” Wright fell in love with America, a new nation “consecrated to freedom.” On September 3, 1818, the 22-year-old writer set foot on that actual land of her dreams. She and her little sister Camilla, a pair of wealthy orphans, spent the next two years touring the young U.S.  Young females did NOT go traveling without a man in those days, but Fanny believed that freedom should apply to women too!

  Her 1821 book about her travels won her the friendship of another freedom fan, the Marquis de Lafayette, who’d helped free America from the British Empire. In 1824, the old Frenchman made sure Fanny met his friend, 81-year-old Thomas Jefferson and his friend, 73-year-old James Madison.

But wait – maybe you already see a fly in the soup. To Fanny, “slavery was revolting everywhere.” Slaves in the Land of Liberty was sickening! As much as she admired the two former presidents, she hated that they lived in slave-built mansions, waited on by people who had no choice but to do so. But slavery really did trouble them, too. Slavery trapped everyone in its evilness. With so much money tied up in costly human property, owners couldn’t afford to let them go. Could blacks support themselves, after lifetimes of being fed, housed, and denied education? Madison and Jefferson thought no; emancipation had to be gradual. Really, centuries of racial division had them and their countrymen thinking that the races could never live together. Surely blacks must go back to Africa! (In fact, many had already been sent there, to Monrovia, but that’s another story for another day.)

So Fanny planned farms where blacks could learn while they earned their freedom money. It was her way of freeing her beloved America from the curse of slavery. She published her idea and tried to make it work on Nashoba, her own farm in Tennessee, but her experiment failed. Then, in the late 1820s, she went around the eastern US, making speeches about all of her freethinking ideas and shocking the daylights out of people. A public-speaking woman was unheard of! Going around, talking about abolition, day care for working mothers, the rights of women and factory workers? SHOCKING! That’s the thing to know about Fanny Wright: She was one stubborn radical, WAY ahead of her time, imagining freedoms she never lived to see.

1824 Henry Inman portrait of Frances "Fanny" Wright. b. Sept. 6, 1795, Dundee, Scotland. d. Dec. 13, 1852, Cincinnati, Ohio

A hostile cartoon lampooning Wright for daring to deliver a series of lectures in 1829, at a time when many felt that public speaking was not an appropriate activity for women.

Cheryl Harness has written (and illustrated) short, spirited profiles of twenty women who impacted life in America by speaking out against injustice and fighting for social improvements. The book spans over two hundred years of American history and includes time lines for such important social movements as abolition, woman suffrage, labor, and civil rights. Readers inspired by these fiery women can use the civil action tips and resources in the back of the book to do some of their own rabble-rousing. For more information, click here.

MLA 8 Citation
Harness, Cheryl. "Shocking Fanny Wright." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 1
Mar. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/
shocking-fanny-wright.

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The Real Life Legendary Trung Sisters of Ancient Vietnam

3/21/2022

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Cheryl Harness
She’s historical!

Way, way back in the year 111 BCE (Before our Common Era), thousands of Chinese warriors armed with fine iron swords and lethal crossbows, rode and marched south to conquer the little kingdom of Nanyue. To the people living there, the little kingdom was Nam Viet. To us, faraway in their unimaginable future, their land is northern Vietnam.

After the invaders came all sorts of Chinese colonizers. They would build roads and temples plus new trading ports on Nanyue’s coast, where the Red River empties into the South China Sea perfect for China’s merchant ships, on their way to or just returned from India. The Chinese brought their culture, language, and top-down style of government too. It would all be for the glory (and increased wealth) of the empire and for the betterment of the conquered barbarians. You’d think they’d appreciate it!

Not necessarily. Over the next thousand years or so, the ancient Vietnamese would get fed up with their heavy taxes and harsh treatment. They’d rise up more than once to challenge their Chinese overlords. One particular revolt would inspire stories ever after. It took place around the years 39-43 CE. Who led this famous revolt? Two daughters of a military ruler; they lived in the vicinity of the modern city of Hanoi.

The women of ancient Vietnam enjoyed much more social equality than Chinese women. Females worked in business, as public officials and they could inherit property. They could become proficient in the martial arts, as did Trung Hac and her younger sister, Trung Nhi. With their knowledge of armor and swords and with their fury, they raised up an army of 80,000 soldiers! Other women, including their mother, were generals, mounted on war elephants at the head of the Trung Sisters’ army! They liberated fortresses, battled the Chinese, and drove them out of Vietnam!

Alas, this is not the end of the Legend of the Trung Sisters. The warriors of wealthier, more powerful China returned to defeat them in the year 43. And rather than surrender, the sisters took what was for them the more honorable action: They took their own lives. Some stories say they drowned themselves in a river. Some say they disappeared into the clouds. Whatever did happen, the Trung Sisters are remembered in plays, poems, and songs to this very day, as Heroines of Vietnam.

The Trung Sisters, warrior-queens of northern Vietnam, ride into battle on war elephants, circa 41 CE. Painting by Bac Ninh via Wikipedia

Trung Hac and Trung Nhi

Even though the Trưng Sisters' revolt against the Chinese was almost 2,000 years ago, its legacy in Vietnam remains as they are seen as symbols of Vietnamese resistance and freedom. To this day, the people of Vietnam perform memorial ceremonies for the sisters every year at a Hanoi temple named for them. This is a statue of the Trung sisters in Ho Chi Minh City.

In a 1776 letter cautioning her husband to "remember the ladies," Abigail Adams made one of the earliest pleas for women's rights in America. How could she have known, in the years to follow, just how many strong and independent women would step forward to forge new paths in their fight for equality?
From Clara Barton and Harriet Tubman to the less well-known but equally important Belva Lockwood and Maya Ying Lin, Remember the Ladies spans the centuries to provide an engaging look at one hundred outstanding women who have helped shape our great nation. Click here.

MLA 8 Citation
Harness, Cheryl. "The Real Life Legendary Trung Sisters of Ancient Vietnam."
Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 22 May 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/
the-nonfiction-minute/The-Real-Life-Legendary-Trung-Sisters-of-Ancient-Vietnam.

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Splash!

3/15/2022

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Cheryl Harness
She's historical!

   Sonora Webster of Georgia adored horses. At age five, she even tried to swap her baby brother for one. Alas, grownups disapproved. At age nineteen, in 1923, Sonora went to the Savannah fair. There she saw a huge, deep pool of water beside a tower as tall as a four-story building. High atop was a lady in a red swimsuit and circle of spotlight. At her signal, a gray horse pounded up the ramps. The lady jumped on. The horse tossed its snowy mane and tail, leaped into space, and down into the pool! Glittering sheets of water SPLASHED the shrieking crowd. After a breathless moment, the horse rocketed UP from the depths, made its way to the arena, and the smiling lady dismounted. How Sonora clapped and cheered— for that beautiful horse!

  As it happened, the elderly showman who’d invented this amazing act needed extra ladies for his popular traveling shows. He advertised in the local paper:

‘Wanted: Attractive young woman who can swim and dive. Likes horses, desires to travel. See Dr. W. F. Carver, Savannah Hotel.’
   “Likes horses?” THIS was the job for Sonora!

            As a trainer, “Doc” Carver was tough, but so was Sonora. She learned how to dive with all five of Doc’s horses, all carefully trained and cared-for. (Veterinarians checked often to see that they were.) In time, she made countless dives— and fell for Doc’s son Al. They married. After Doc died, Al took over the act, starring Sonora and the magnificent diving horses.

Sonora met her day of destiny at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier, New Jersey’s great amusement park, July 14, 1931. She hopped astride Red Lips, her favorite horse. “Red” leaped from the tower. And somehow, Sonora hit the water face first, in the instant before she closed her eyes. They stung, but how could she know that the water collision had loosened her eyeballs’ retinas? She didn’t! Soon, despite medical treatments, 27-year-old Sonora saw her vision fading away. Could she accept that her diving days were over? She wouldn’t! She might have lost her sight, but her love and trust for her brave horses? Never! They’d keep flying through the air together, thrilling and splashing audiences for the next eleven years.

Sonora Webster Carver told her story in her 1961 memoir, A Girl and Five Brave Horses, which inspired a 1991 film, Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken. She died at age 99, in 2003.

Because world-traveling sharpshooter, William Frank Carver had been a dentist, such friends as “Buffalo Bill” Cody called him “Doc.” Wikimedia

Sonora and her brave diving partner. Equine Inc.

An exciting day at Steel Pier, Atlantic City, N.J. NJ com

Cheryl Harness is an illustrator as well an author, as seen by her delightful poster-like illustrations in Women Daredevils by Julia Cummins. The book offers mini biographies of ten fascinating women who risked their lives in the late 1800s and early 1900s to entertain the public.

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The Aristocrat and the Spy

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Shocking Fanny Wright

The Real Life Legendary Trung Sisters of Ancient Vietnam

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